[SGVLUG] Upgrade problems with Debian apt-get

[David Lawyer]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 05:22:53PM -0800, Dustin Laurence wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 04:47:30PM -0800, David Lawyer wrote:
> 
> > I've been upgrading my Debian testing "distribution" about once a
> > year.
> 
 Even security updates?  Or do you do just security the rest of the time?
 I don't pay any attention to security except checking the logs showed
failed attempts to use my PC as a mail relay.
> 
> > download (about 36 hours) on my 28.8k modem.  Even 56k wouldn't help
> > much as I understand they don't really do 56k.
> 
> Who is "they"?  Your ISP?  Debian's servers easily saturate my pipe
> at about 300Kbyte/s, so there is no bottleneck on their end.
Sorry.  They = 56k modems.
> 
> > additional packages).  So by doing a so called "dist-upgrade" it did
> > better.  I also tried various flags to get it to fetch everything.
> > I found one package missing from their server but got the same package
> > from "unstable" and it works and reported the bug to Debian.
> 
> Did this involve a version upgrade (Woody to Sarge, I guess it would be)?   

No it's the Etch version but not really (or what will become the next
version after Sarge).  I still run Debian 1.1 from 1996 and have never
upgraded to a never version :-).  Sort of.  But I've downloaded new
versions of applications (and new applications I've heard about)
whenever I felt like it.  And doing this forced me to download a lot
of other packages that were dependencies.  I've also installed the
latest kernels every few months.  Then when apt-get came along, I
started using their upgrade option to automatically upgrade every
package on my PC to the latest testing "version".  So I doubt if there
are any packages left from Debian 1.1.  There might be.  I just
deleted an obsolete 5-year-old package.  And when I boot I get a login
message that says Debian 1.1 so there is at least one file left over
from 1.1.  So what version do I have?: an almost cutting-edge
"testing" version (After I wrote the above I just looked at the
/etc/debian_version file and it contains "testing/unstable")  It's not
really a version since it changes daily as packages from "unstable"
are put into "testing"..  There must be some others running a really
cutting-edge "unstable" version where all the packages are classified
as unstable.

> You have run Debian longer than I have but it seems that version
> upgrades don't necessarily "just work" if you do dist-upgrade.  I
> think you have to check the release notes first.  I believe that
> some people had a hairy time upgrading Woody if they didn't, for
> example.
Not applicable since I don't use any official version.
> 
> No specific advice, sorry.  If you get desperate you might try
> backing up your /etc/ files, purging the old package, re-installing
> the new one (which you obviously already have downloaded and can do
> without the network), and then redo the config by hand based on your
> old /etc files.

I'm not sure you understand the situation.  I've got 16 new packages
not configured per apt-get, label them A-P.  Now B-P (15 packages)
depend (directly or indirectly) on package A.  the A-P binaries have
all been installed in their usual locations such as /usr/sbin,
/usr/bin, etc.  So they are all being used.  But since package A will
not configure (via apt-get) apt-get refuses to try to configure the
other packages B-P that require package A as a prerequisite.  If they
are not configured, then how can they work?  Well, apparently apt-get
hasn't yet deleted my old configuration files from the old versions.
So everything seems to work OK, but there could be bugs due to stuff
in the new configuration files that's either not in the old or
different than the old.  Luckily, I think there's a tendency to be
backward compatible in software so that old configuration files will
still work with newer versions.  But not always.

Thus I need to hopefully fix this before a bug happens.  There's a
"force" option in apt-get which I could try but it says its dangerous
to use.

In answer to another post: I've traced the configuration problem to
a function call in the postinstall script for netkit-inetd.  It's:
db_get netkit-inetd/inetd-dos-services
This call is made but never returns.  What does it do?  What is
dos-services?  They might be the dos-services for MS DOS that were
equivalent to the system calls in Linux ??  But why would Linux need
these unless it's going to do dos emulation?

			David Lawyer